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Princess Diana's Designer Jacques Azagury Talks About Re-creating Her Iconic Looks for Film

Princess Diana wears two Jacques Azagury creations—left, in 1997 to the ballet, right in 1985.

Diana, a new biopic about Princess Diana, opens in theaters today. Starring Naomi Watts as the royal, the film showcases a virtual retrospective of some of the princess's most iconic looks—re-created for the silver screen by Diana's own designer Jacques Azagury.

Naomi Watts plays Princess Diana in a new biopic, in theaters today.

In an interview with S.F. Gate, Azagury talks extensively about his thoughts on the film—and how he decided to collaborate with the movie's costume designer, Julian Day. Here are some of our favorite tidbits from his discussion.

On what he made for the film and why Diana was iconic: "We made two replicas for the movie of some of the dresses I made for the princess with another few that were “Dianeque” dresses, what she would have worn based on her aesthetic as I knew it There were lots of things that made up Diana; her look wasn’t just one thing, remember, she was really a phenomenon. It was the dresses, the way she acted, the way she approached people, her approach to life: It was a hundred things that all came together to make one special person. That’s why one single person has never been able to replace her, not from royalty, not from cinema, not from fashion."

Princess Diana holds Prince William on the cover of Life in 1984.

On the secret shapewear he built into Princess Diana's dresses: "At the time she was really working out, she had a great body, incredible legs; it was really more about the whole person. Of course the dresses were important, but they were very simple dresses. It was more about the cut and the fabric. Having said that they were deceptively simple: Inside the dresses there were bustiers; there were corsets to give them that shape."

On the Duchess of Cambridge Kate Middleton's style: "The duchess is a beautiful girl. She dresses very well sometimes; sometimes she dresses more normally, like someone on the high street, which I think is done on purpose. She doesn’t want fashion to be the story. They don’t want another repeat of what happened to Diana. She’s not the same creature."

Will you be checking out Diana when it's released in theaters today? Tell us what you think!